Invisible Monsters - Chuck Palahniuk
She's a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a real woman, who will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better. And that salvation hides in the last places you'll ever want to look.
In this hilarious and daringly unpredictable novel, the narrator must exact revenge upon Evie, her best friend and model; kidnap Manus, her two-timing ex-boyfriend; and hit the road with Brandy in search of a brand-new past, present, and future. Changing names and stories in every city. they catapult toward a final confrontation with a rifle-toting Evie - by which time we will have learned that loving and being loved are not mutually exclusive, and that nothing, on the surface, is ever quite what it seems.
I have to admit that, while I tried to come into this book with an open mind, I also came in not expecting to like it much. And while I didn't hate it, I didn't really like it much, either. Chuck Palahniuk, from everything I've ever heard, is the sort of author that you either love or hate, as a general rule. And based on my watching of Fight Club, I was pretty sure I was going to fall closer to the hate end of the spectrum. His writing is very visceral, very jumpy, and seems to have a tendency to go off the deep end by the time you get to the end. In any case, I opted to read this one because one of my co-workers, whose taste is so similar to mine that we're beginning to wonder if we're actually the same person, really liked it, so I though it might be a good intro to Palahniuk for me.
This particular story I found quite aimless, actually. I never got much of a sense of purpose or direction as to where this was all going. Maybe that was on purpose; maybe it just happened. Either way, it made it harder for me to get into it, because I just didn't really feel that there was much reason for me to feel anything one way or the other for these characters or what they were trying to accomplish (and I'm still not sure what that was, really). About halfway through, the revelations about these characters start. At that point, I definitely got more interested. It didn't help with the aimlessness of it, but it did get me actually interested in the characters themselves, so that did allow me to breeze through the second half a little quicker than the first half.
I would like to say, though, that he does rely too heavily on repetition of the same adjective from time to time. I can actually only think of one example, so maybe there actually was just the one, but seriously, the number of times he refers to Brandy's "Plumbago mouth," I wanted to slap him. Frankly, I don't even know what it means. Is he referring to the Plumbago flower's shape? Its colour? (Of which, by the way, there are four or five, so that doesn't really narrow it down much.) I have no idea, so for all the effect it had, it might as well have been a random word just thrown in to up the word count or something.
All in all, I still think that Palahniuk is not my style, although I can see how he might appeal to some. And I can definitely see why one might be inclined to make some of his work into movies. Based on this one, they're presented very visually, without too much introspection, and they're not that long, so you could theoretically get quite a bit of it in, and not have to cut too much. So there's that.
Next up: Looking for Alaska, by John Green
In this hilarious and daringly unpredictable novel, the narrator must exact revenge upon Evie, her best friend and model; kidnap Manus, her two-timing ex-boyfriend; and hit the road with Brandy in search of a brand-new past, present, and future. Changing names and stories in every city. they catapult toward a final confrontation with a rifle-toting Evie - by which time we will have learned that loving and being loved are not mutually exclusive, and that nothing, on the surface, is ever quite what it seems.
I have to admit that, while I tried to come into this book with an open mind, I also came in not expecting to like it much. And while I didn't hate it, I didn't really like it much, either. Chuck Palahniuk, from everything I've ever heard, is the sort of author that you either love or hate, as a general rule. And based on my watching of Fight Club, I was pretty sure I was going to fall closer to the hate end of the spectrum. His writing is very visceral, very jumpy, and seems to have a tendency to go off the deep end by the time you get to the end. In any case, I opted to read this one because one of my co-workers, whose taste is so similar to mine that we're beginning to wonder if we're actually the same person, really liked it, so I though it might be a good intro to Palahniuk for me.
This particular story I found quite aimless, actually. I never got much of a sense of purpose or direction as to where this was all going. Maybe that was on purpose; maybe it just happened. Either way, it made it harder for me to get into it, because I just didn't really feel that there was much reason for me to feel anything one way or the other for these characters or what they were trying to accomplish (and I'm still not sure what that was, really). About halfway through, the revelations about these characters start. At that point, I definitely got more interested. It didn't help with the aimlessness of it, but it did get me actually interested in the characters themselves, so that did allow me to breeze through the second half a little quicker than the first half.
I would like to say, though, that he does rely too heavily on repetition of the same adjective from time to time. I can actually only think of one example, so maybe there actually was just the one, but seriously, the number of times he refers to Brandy's "Plumbago mouth," I wanted to slap him. Frankly, I don't even know what it means. Is he referring to the Plumbago flower's shape? Its colour? (Of which, by the way, there are four or five, so that doesn't really narrow it down much.) I have no idea, so for all the effect it had, it might as well have been a random word just thrown in to up the word count or something.
All in all, I still think that Palahniuk is not my style, although I can see how he might appeal to some. And I can definitely see why one might be inclined to make some of his work into movies. Based on this one, they're presented very visually, without too much introspection, and they're not that long, so you could theoretically get quite a bit of it in, and not have to cut too much. So there's that.
Next up: Looking for Alaska, by John Green